Stoat: How an Early Oil Industry Study Became Key in Climate Lawsuits?

Another in the who-knew-what-when games, from the Yale Environment 360. I think it is yet more proof that people are lying to themselves and are going to get badly disappointed when this hits a competent court¹; but in the meantime people are presumably getting paid for this trash, and making reputations out of it.

Aanyway, what they're getting over-excited by now is a 1968 paper commissioned by the American Petroleum Institute, the powerful fossil fuel trade group, and written by Elmer Robinson and Bob Robbins, scientists at the Stanford Research Institute. The claim made is that it shows that the science around climate change was clear. Of course, it does no such thing, which anyone vaguely sane could tell without reading it, because we all know that the science wasn't clear in 1968.

They provide a link to excepts (though as far as I can tell not to the whole thing) helpfully highlit to guide your eye. But if you allow your eye to slip away from their guidance (yellow) to my guidance (green) you find "Whether one chooses the CO2 warming theory as described in detail by Revelle and others or the newer cooling prospect indicated by McCormick and Ludwig, the prospect for the future must be of serious concern".

So far from the science being clear, they weren't even sure what direction the temperature trend would be. Which is unsurprising, because we all know that in 1975 the NAS wrote we do not have a good quantitative understanding of our climate machine and what determines its course. Without the fundamental understanding, it does not seem possible to predict climate.

Notes

1. That the Supremes recently denied oil companies moves to get some cases moved from state to federal courts doens't help anyone very much, I think. A whole pile of lawyers get lucky, because they get to make a pile of money. The state courts will decide whatever, and the decisions will get appealled to the Supremes, which will throw them out if they've been stupid.